Drug Trafficker Draws 35-Year Prison Sentence : Cocaine: The term for member of a ring that amassed record amount of the narcotic in Sylmar is more than double the recommended length.

A member of a drug-trafficking ring that amassed a record amount of cocaine in a Sylmar warehouse was sentenced Thursday to 35 years in prison by a federal judge, who declared that the enormity of the crime justified a term more than double the length recommended by probation authorities.

Before the sentence was pronounced in Los Angeles by U.S. District Judge Terry J. Hatter Jr., the convicted defendant, Jose Ignacio Monroy, 38, of Mexico City, wept and pleaded for mercy.

“I have committed an offense which gives me a great deal of pain,” Monroy told Hatter through an interpreter. “I wish that it had never happened.”

Under federal law, Monroy will have to serve about 30 years in prison before being considered for release.

Hatter said the stiff sentence, based on Monroy’s conviction on drug conspiracy and trafficking charges, was justified given “the voluminous amount of drugs involved here” that had an “impact not only on the Los Angeles area but on the nation as a whole.”

Last week, Hatter sentenced Monroy’s father-in-law, Carlos Tapia-Ponce, 69, a former Mexican customs official, whom prosecutors called the patriarch of the Sylmar ring, to life in prison without parole.

The sentencing hearing sparked passionate rhetoric from both the prosecutor and the defense attorney. Assistant U.S. Atty. James P. Walsh Jr. urged a life sentence; Monroy’s lawyer, Michael D. Nasatir, implored Hatter to “not lock (Monroy) away like an animal for life.”

Turning often to face Monroy, Walsh portrayed an individual who participated in a drug ring that destroyed the lives of “countless thousands whose only fault is that they’re weak.”

“I see Mr. Monroy as an author of destruction on a scale that beggars belief and description,” said Walsh, who until recently headed the U.S. Attorney’s major narcotics unit in Los Angeles.

In urging a life term, Walsh disclosed that Monroy was offered a plea-bargain deal of 10 years in prison if he would testify in September at a trial of the remaining Sylmar defendants--a deal subject to Hatter’s approval. But Monroy rejected the offer, Walsh said.

For his part, Nasatir recalled a recent program on National Public Radio on the horror and hopelessness of prisoners serving life terms. Never seeing his two young daughters again, Nasatir told Hatter, was Monroy’s “worst nightmare.”

Walsh, too, said he had been heartbroken by a recent radio narrative that explored the terrible impact of crack cocaine on babies born of addicted mothers. Their cries, he said, “don’t even sound like babies, they sound like cats.”

Nasatir criticized Walsh “for whipping up passions” in Hatter, a judge who the defense attorney said had demonstrated an abhorrence for drug dealers during his 11 years on the federal bench.

Nasatir urged Hatter to follow the U.S. Probation Department’s recommendation for a 15-year sentence because, he said, his client did not play a major role in the Sylmar operation.

During the trial, the government argued that Monroy was a regular worker at the warehouse, to which he had a key, and that he delivered large quantities of cocaine to drug traffickers in the Los Angeles area.

More than 21 tons of cocaine were seized in Sylmar in September, 1989, along with $12 million in cash. Government investigators estimated that about 77 tons of cocaine had been successfully distributed nationally in the three months before the raid on the San Fernando Valley warehouse.

The Colombian-produced cocaine was shipped through Mexico, smuggled across the border at El Paso, Tex., and hauled to Los Angeles aboard big-rig trucks along the interstate highway system.

Drug Enforcement Administration officials said the amount of illicit drugs confiscated in the Sylmar warehouse far surpassed any narcotics seizure anywhere in the world, including Colombia.

Hector Tapia Anchondo, son of the patriarch of the ring, and two other defendants must be retried in September along with a fourth individual.

Nasatir said he would file an appeal on behalf of Monroy. “Putting him away without hope is worse than a death sentence,” he said.